


Wings

by prairiecrow



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Birds, Dreams, Established Relationship, M/M, Poetry, Wingfic, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-02
Updated: 2012-03-02
Packaged: 2017-11-01 00:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/349939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Julian dreams of the essence of things. (This story deals with poetry, but is itself prose.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wings

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Set post-"The Search". 2) The first verse of "Nightingale Woman" was quoted in the ST:TOS episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before"; the second verse is my own. 3) "Hurt Hawks" was written by Robinson Jeffers (1928).

They spent the evening as they often did of late: discussing literature, the give and take of words like the flash and cut of blades. Tonight the subject was poetry, in particular the works of the twentieth century Terran poet Tarbolde, whom Julian thought the finest romanticist of the past four hundred years and Garak dismissed as intolerably sentimental. That led them through intricate spirals across the cultural landscapes of their disparate civilizations and on a long excursion into the territory (increasingly familiar to Julian) of personal love versus the "greater" love of the State… but when it was over he was the one that Garak went to bed with, not the Cardassian motherland, so he supposed that was all right.  
  
Afterwards. drifting off to sleep with a sturdy grey arm around his waist and the spy's comforting weight against his back and thighs, feeling the slight impression of each cool scale, he wondered drowsily how much truth he'd actually caught a glimpse of tonight. He was settling at something like 70.457 percent, an exceptionally high figure, when darkness covered his mind and everything slipped away.  
  
********************************************  
  
Not quite everything, it seemed.  
  
 _My love has wings,  
slender, feathered things  
with grace in upswept curve  
and tapered tip…_  
  
Garak's wings weren't like that: Julian knew this as surely as he knew the pattern of ridges that adorned his paramour's skin. No, they were broad and powerful, the wings of an owl or some other nocturnal predator, and so black that you wouldn't be able to see them against the depths of space at all if it weren't for the delicate bars of antiqued silver that patterned the primaries and the secondaries, fading to rare speckles on the coverts. The leading edge was invisible: prey never saw it coming, until it had passed over them and razor talons had already stripped open their lives, splattering vivid red beneath the pinions of death.  
  
 _And where she goes  
her voice, like silver, flows  
from slender throat and  
sweetly luring lip…_  
  
No, he decided, Garak had been right: Tarbolde simply didn't suit Cardassian sensibilities. As he walked across the top of the upper docking pylon toward the negative shape cut out of the starfield ahead, instantly recognizing the curve of ebony hair and the sturdy figure sheathed in jet brocade and boots of polished black leather, the verses of a much different poet came to mind:  
  
 _The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,  
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,   
  
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine  
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote  
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.  
  
He stands under the oak-bush and waits   
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom  
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.   
  
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.  
The curs of the day come and torment him  
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,   
  
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. _  
  
Sound did not carry in a vacuum, but as he came within five metres Garak turned sharply, his gaze as cold and as sharp as glass, his wings flaring out from his shoulders in a warning mantle. They were not broken — he was intact, fully capable of flight — but in the starlight Julian could dimly see the weight of the chains that bound him here, so subtle they were practically one with his basic substance. All the sky lay above and around them, but its reaches were forbidden: Garak's masters had placed jesses upon him, but they had not been able to hood him.   
  
That was why there was blood upon him, and for once that blood did not belong to his victims.  
  
Julian went to him, hands outstretched to ease the pain, long feathers spreading from his own shoulders, pennons of red and gold as slim as a kestrel's. He healed the wounds with a physician's touch; he weakened the chains with lover's kiss, and as their wings fully opened and met tip to tip he dared to hope that it was enough.   
  
He took him in his arms, this lethal creature he had come to love, and he looked down into those eyes that held inhuman enigmas enough to last a lifetime, and he whispered soundlessly in the icy void:  _Come with me._  
  
And he soared.  
  
********************************************  
  
Waking just long enough to turn over in the darkness, he curved close against Garak's back and spread sleepy protection over him as silent as a mantle of feathers, an unrepentant blaze of russet and gold.  
  
THE END


End file.
